Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

This has been on my ‘to read’ list for over ten years. I have loved several other Ann Patchett novels so had high expectations for this one.

The story is loosely inspired by a real-life Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru that occurred in 1996. Patchett has moved the event to ‘somewhere in South America’ at a Vice President’s residence. She adds a famous opera singer as one of the hostages. And of course, what happens inside the residence over a period of many months is pure fiction. At first the tension is palpable as the hostages fear for their lives. ‘They would each and every one of them die. Surely they had always known this, but now death came and sat on their chests at night, peered cold and hungry into their eyes.’

This is a highly romanticised vision of what can happen in a hostage situation. It’s safe to assume most of us are more than familiar with Stockholm syndrome, where hostages develop an emotional bond to their captors. In Patchett’s story, these feelings of empathy are reciprocated. Over time, relationships develop between members of the two groups. Friendships flourish, as common ground is discovered. Love finds a space to grow. Even as the reader feels sympathy for all involved, there is an overarching sense of doom. You know that the situation cannot continue indefinitely, that eventually outside forces are going to destroy the idyll.

I feel this book is going to mean more to readers who love opera. Opera is really not my ‘bag’. There are many references to famous operas and an assumption that the reader will totally understand when a bunch of terrorists fall under the spell of an opera soprano singer – almost as if ‘music will sooth the savage beast’.

There is a lot to like about Bel Canto, particularly Patchett’s wonderful writing. She writes of one of the young terrorists eating through information ‘like fire licks up hay’ – what an analogy!

Reviewed by Gaby Meares
SMSA Member